Beware, Princess Elizabeth Read Free

loved her, he determined to rid himself of her. He had her locked in the Tower and then contrived to have her sentenced to death for charges of adultery and treason. There was not a word of truth in the charges.
    Would King Henry have ordered my mother's execution if I had been a boy? I believe not. He might have found love with another woman, as he was wont to do, but he would have let Anne live, and I would have had my mother. And so my feelings about my father were never simple and uncomplicated. I did love him, because he was my father and a great king. But I also harbored a dark secret: I resented him deeply for depriving me of my mother. The darkest secret of all: At times I hated him.
    Then, just weeks after my mother's death, my father married Jane Seymour. "The opposite of your mother," Kat replied when I pressed her for a description of a woman I scarcely remember. "Pretty, I suppose, but rather colorless. Quite prim." Kat pursed her lips. "Queen Jane had the good fortune to bear a male child, to the king's delight. And then she had the good sense to die almost at once, before he tired of her."
    Kat should never have said such a thing, of course, but Kat had a talent for saying things she ought not. Her tongue often brought her trouble.
    My mother was not the only wife my father sent to the Tower and then had put to death. I was eight years old when his fifth, Catherine Howard, was sentenced to die. All the nervous excitement of this latest execution could not be kept from me, and it was as if my own mother's execution were being repeated. I wept, I cried out, for days I could neither sleep nor eat. Kat, frantic to calm me, summoned the court physician to prescribe a sleeping draught.
    When I awoke it was over. I listened as servants whispered how Catherine Howard's head had been caught in a basket, her blood sopped up by crones with handkerchiefs, her body carried off for burial.
The way it must have been for my mother,
I thought, and I have thought of it many times since that day. Remembering Catherine Howard's death has always struck terror to my heart.
     
    T HE TWELVE DAYS of the lying-in-state ended. From the palace window Edward and Mary and I watched the somber procession that stretched for miles, following my father's coffin to Windsor Castle. By custom the monarch's heirs did not attend his funeral, but it seemed that nearly everyone else did. The wax effigy rode in a carriage drawn by eight black horses in black velvet trappings.
    In the days that followed, I waited to learn what turn my life would take next. I had no control over events; I could only control my response to them. Wrapped in the silence of my own lonely thoughts, I paced the snowy paths in the bleak palace garden. My father was dead. My sister, Mary, was cold and withdrawn. My little brother, Edward, was now king.
What will become of me?
I wondered over and over.
What will become of me?
But I decided that, however much fear and worry now gnawed at my vitals, I would one day learn to rule my own life.
    ***
    O N THE TWENTIETH day of February,
anno Domini
1547, I witnessed the coronation of my brother, Edward. Those who were there the day in 1509 when my father was crowned were determined that this celebration would surpass it in grandeur.
    The day before the coronation, as the royal procession wound its way through London, trumpeters blew fanfares to proclaim the approach of the boy-king. My little brother, dressed in cloth of silver embroidered in gold and belted with rubies, pearls, and diamonds, was mounted high on a huge white horse trapped with crimson satin. He was followed by the nobility of the kingdom, according to rank. The two Seymour brothers, Edward and Tom, took the lead.
    So much splendor on such a delicate young boy! He wore a look of proud hauteur, but I knew that was a mask to disguise his fear. For a little while I imagined myself in his place, arrayed in ermine and jewels, surrounded by members of the privy council in